Grants of up to £3m being offered to help charities reopen heritage sites in 2021

Grants of up to £3m being offered to help charities reopen heritage sites in 2021

Heritage charities are being offered grants of between £10,000 and £3m help them reopen historic places and places of cultural interest as England looks to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021.

This second round of Culture Recovery Fund money will look towards Spring and Summer when cultural organisations are expected to be able to operate with fewer restrictions.

Grants will be available for the period of April to June this year “to support organisations with the costs they will face as they welcome visitors back”, according to the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF).

Applications for the second round of funding, of grants between £10,000 and £3m to support organisations make the transition towards full reopening, take place from 7-26 January. A total of £36m of this funding is being distributed by the NLHF.

The other element of the Culture Recovery Fund support is through repayable finance, with a budget of up to £100m. Repayble finance allocations have a lower limit of £1m and no upper limit. They are also available to charity and commercial organisations.

Support webinars for applicants are taking place on 13-14 January.

In October more than 400 heritage charities and other organisations shared more than £100m in government funding to tackle the financial fall out of the Covid-19 health crisis. The previous month Historic Royal Palaces announced plans for 145 redundancies.

The heritage and culture sector has been particularly badly hit amid the pandemic due to a dramatic fall in visitor numbers.

Also last year Second World War codebreakers charity the Bletchley Park Trust announced it was looking to cut its workforce by a third.